The strange

Author's name: Malika Oufkir

In it, Malika Afkir describes the day she was released from prison after twenty years were cut short from her life in Hassan II's harshest prison. She describes the luxury of freedom and her attempt to patch up what was cut short from her life, sometimes succeeding and other times failing. She is in Paris, where she can walk without looking back, exercise freedom of speech, choose her food and her books, ride the metro, drive, and speak to a policeman without him raising his voice or whipping her and beating her back. She contrasts the years when her family members were rotting in the prison that the king wanted to avenge her father's soul, with the sudden flow of dreams despite the five years of siege in freedom, during which Moroccan intelligence services interrogated anyone who approached the family, shook hands with one of its members, or smiled at any of them. Malika carries with her twenty years of lost time, and whenever she recalls an old scene, even if it was sharing with insects and mice the crumbs of bread they buried underground for fear of being confiscated, the scene collides with the world of freedom, and the matter becomes confusing for her, so she cannot differentiate between a real prison and a large prison.